Crysis 3

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First results with the new driver are identical to the first numbers from the 13.5 beta drivers.

Well look at that, another great result for the new prototype driver from AMD - the new results from the FRAPS and the observed frame rate are nearly identical. And compared to the orange line from our initial review there appear to be no runt frame issues!

The frame times are indicative of the changes with the prototype driver changes - the black line is much more consistent than the orange line though not quite up to the levels of the GTX 690.

Much like we saw with the Battlefield 3 results the revised driver on the HD 7990 is completely changing the performance aspects of the card. The average frame rate of 36 FPS is higher than the 34 FPS of the GTX 690 and the 25 FPS of the GTX Titan.

Our frame time variance data shows the changes in another light - while there are still some instances of 5 ms over the 90th percentile it is significantly improved over our 13.5 beta results.

And now for some video evidence of this new driver in action, I present a side-by-side comparison! For the best viewing, be sure to download the original 60 FPS MP4 file though you might still be able to see the differences in the Flash-based 30 FPS YouTube embeds.

Frame time [ms] chart and "Observed FPS" chart seem to contradict each other. In frame time chart, there are ~0.1 ms [partial] frames being shown which are not present in "Observed FPS" chart, probably because they would have to be up up there, somewhere around 100000 FPS if I'm not mistaken.

SFMBE
What we call "runt" frames - frames less than x lines high, are pretty useless if they come once in a while BUT if all the [partial, of course] frames were as small as possible, that would mean that you get the most information out of your display.

If you guarantee that new information comes at a steady rate, that is a form of frame metering. If you don't guarantee, then information comes in as fast as possible but animation may be compromised like we have seen here. It's a tradeoff.

What you are asking of your pc is to render 100 times the framerate that it currently does, on a 100 x 100 display. Yes, the effect would be buttery smooth and would have essentially no visible tearing, ever. But nobody plays a game on a 100 x 100 display, and even at the fairly normal 1080p(1080 x 60fps to maintain one refresh per horizontal pixel line) thats a required framerate of 64,800fps. While i would like to say my PC gets 64 thousand frames per second in BF3 or Crysis3, Its simply not going to happen any time soon.

Partial frames and runts are not desirable at all. A small number of partials produce the tearing effect that everyone is familiar with. But, if every line on your display represented a discrete moment in time like a rolling shutter, you end up with the shearing or "wobble" effect associated with rolling shutters in digital cameras.

Along these lines, it would be cool to see a monitor technology capable of variable refresh rate, such that it can refresh upon each new complete frame from the GPU, giving dynamic V-Sync to the monitor based on GPU frames, not the other way around.

but how wrong do you think it is of them to release a card that they know has problems. you asked them to delay the release and they released it anyway knowing what they know, you can sugar coat it anyway you want but don't you think that's a little corrupt of them, knowing some people will buy those cards and have no clue their buying something they are not getting as advertised..

Well, there's nothing really wrong with the hardware. It appears that AMD will be able to fix the issues in due time. If you assume that's true, then people will be able to get the performance that the cards are truly capable sometime in the future. I'm not saying it's completely the right thing to do, but hopefully the kind of person buying a $1000 graphics card does their due diligence and knows what they're getting into.

Let's not forget though that GPUs can be used for more than just gaming. When used for compute applications, the driver problems that AMD has is a non-issue.

You were always vindicated, except the part about sitting on the info for a full year, giving the amd fanboys the most gigantic break they could ever have hoped to acquire.

Rest well, those of us without the quite severe mental problems already knew all about this years ago, and there are those who will not ever come clean, in their minds, and face reality, and their number is legion.
Remember one of the Ten is - do not falsely accuse thy neighbor - so this is a much more common occurrence than most of us would like to recognize.

I congratulate you for actually forcing the change upon the stubborn you know whoms (amd and their entourage of fanboys)... which by the way, will soon be singing ANOTHER TUNE.

That new sirens song, will be glory and praise on high, to the fps gods, and new rash of verdetrol addiction will no doubt descend upon this and all other similar websites.

Then, though you won't often get direct praise, it will be clear that your "harsh and hate filled bias against amd!!!" will have produced the results the little raging card moaners declared to be the case near serveral years ago - "superior amd hardware!!!" as the fps tales will indeed, as the preliminary shows, loft the broken runted zero dropper card(s) into the lead.

Oh happy days, that will come, after END OF LIFE for amd.
*snicker, it couldn't be sicker amd*

Yes, when the amd cards are finally EOL, the drivers will be "fixed for the moment" and the endless worshipful amd slave will slobber all over you, profusely, in gratitiude.
I'm certain you can hardly wait.

Don't worry, we have seen that no matter how bad amd gets, a thousand fanboys are screaming for they are the very best.

This latest fail has been years in the running, and this very site sat on it for nearly a year, then was harshly accused of bias for nVidia, since the amd fanboys are so clueless and lazy and don't read, or if they do, their emotions immediately replace any common sense they could muster with the utmost effort.

Yes, you don't need to worry, amd made certain it had loads of hate filled raging amd fanboys, and that brainwashing is not wearing off, ever.

Wow such vehemence... I am reminded of high school and watching the awkward dweeb giggle at his own uncomfortably dull insults. I wonder what horrors you suffered at the hands of an AMD fanboy to instill you with such vitriol. What ever the injustice it has inspired you with a remarkably irrational hatred... Without AMD, nvidia would be selling all their cards at similar premium to their new GTX 780. I personally prefer Nvidia because of their drivers but lately, price and the great game bundles have me thinking of giving AMD a chance for a generation. This is precisely why AMD being healthy is a obvious benefit to all consumers. But regardless you will have plenty of opportunities to hate on AMD and AMD users since now all three major consoles have big red technology under the hood...

Unfortunately. the "newest amd card" will always have the latest renewed and unprecedented set of multiple driver fiasco problems.

Go for EOL amd, then at least the gigantic industrially misshapen driver iron has been pressing away multiple flattenings and rewrinklings into that amd game card fabric, and by chance with a very stiff shot of starch under your collar you'll be fine grimacing and bearing it.

If stating the truths we have all seen is considered a mental problem for you, then you of course are a raging fanboy in denial.

As I've told you fools many times before, the ONLY way we have ever seen amd improve their drivers is with strong criticism from review sites - unfortunately the last round of harshness from hardocp with terry mekdon in there concerning crossfire has turned out to be this lousy dropped and runted frames "fix".

So yes, even I was wrong when I praised hardocp for finally complaining about crossfire failure and amd "fixing it".

Instead, "the fix was in".

These are facts, not "blokes opinions", and certainly not omg look at this bloke crap that you spewed.

MAN UP and face the facts, like a man, not a crybaby fanboy filled with lies.

Unfortunately. the "newest amd card" will always have the latest renewed and unprecedented set of multiple driver fiasco problems.

...

If stating the truths we have all seen is considered a mental problem for you, then you of course are a raging fanboy in denial.

If you're going to present that as a fact, you'd best back that up with references, or you'd be no better than any fanboy. You're stating that every release of a new AMD card (or lets say, new architecture) is plagued with driver troubles, and implying that such is not the case with NVidia cards, right? If it's as bad as you say, you'd have no problems finding sources that tell it like that.

If you install as per amd instruction?everything is way worst then if you install the Microsoft way (a LA compatibility) like clean install)ms not speaking to amd or vice versa,,methodology whise?ya!again corp trying to outsmart os maker!

If you install as per amd instruction?everything is way worst then if you install the Microsoft way (a LA compatibility) like clean install)ms not speaking to amd or vice versa,,methodology whise?ya!again corp trying to outsmart os maker!

hey ryan do you know if the runt frame problem exists with the older generation ati/amd cards in crossfirex? i have a system with 2 5770 cards in crossfire and i had a lot of issues while playing games, and i was just wondering if maybe that was the problem the whole time.

YES, of course it does. DUH. AMD sucks, and is a foaming at the mouth evil corp, unlike nVidia, the exact opposite of what the monkees preached to everyone for years on end.

In any case there's no chance the data won't come out, but the reviewers are busy catching up on the very current right now, so a bit more patience and full of the horrors will be seen, mark my words, there is no chance it isn't coming.

Any chance that you'll get to frame rating 3-way/Quad Crossfire/SLI? I would love to see the variance and improvements that could be achieved. Especially for someone interested in 7990x2+ configurations.

Well, the thing is that you either have vsync on preventing the tearing or you have max framerate.

The issue with vsync is that your performance will have to be in direct relation to your displays frequency, so with a standard 60hz display your fps would either be 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, 10... and with a 120hz display you would have 120, 60, 40, 30, 24, 20, 17.14, 15, 10.91, 10 ....

With vsync on WYSIWYG, meaning that the shown and perceived framerate is identical as each time a full frame will be shown, so no "runt" will ever exist.

After saying all this i now notice that you didn't understand properly the problem discussed with multigpu setups, look at the "monitor output by dual gpus" graphic and notice that the frame metered solution doesn't show a full frame because of it's nature, what it does is that the ammount of frame shown from each gpu is cut to be aproximately of the same size, and this more homogeneization of frame time is what gives fluidity to the experience.

Unlike Hardocp who didn't even mention the prototype driver and slammed the 7990 in its current driver state, atleast pcper mentioned the future fix, and they even went further showing results in a seperate review. Thats about as fair as you can be.

Even though this driver will be years late for non vsync xfire users (vsync + rp dfc fixed this issue long ago for me), but better late than never for those who game without that configuration and really one of nvidias biggest multi gpu advantages is about to dissapear , as results even this early are very encouraging.

i think that you didn't understand very well the issue...first of all indeed it's not only a crossfire issue, the new drivers will fix everything about the frame generation, after that the frame is put into the frame buffer from the pipeline...so it will be also a single config improvement. And also the v-sync function will work better and it will benefit, as it's always related to the frame buffer, from which vsync pulls the frames from.

The difference between drivers in "Observed FPS" can be used as an estimate for the amount of discarded or runt frames. The only way to eliminate those is by having one GPU wait until the other is almost done rendering a frame, a "tandem" setup. If you are having one GPU waiting, it's not consuming power.

You guys are looking at frame averages (fps) without looking at the frame distribution underneath. The prototype driver achieves the same fps numbers doing *less* work than the normal driver, since its *efficiency* is higher.

Looking at the frame variance charts, we can estimate the time each GPU is waiting in the prototype driver -- e.g., for BF3, each will wait around 10ms. In the same chart, we can see that the normal driver keeps both GPU always at 100%, that's why frames vary ~[0,20]ms.

So, not only does the normal driver spends time rendering frames that won't be seen, it renders them inconsistently.

Bottom line, from the moment a driver introduces any kind of time delay into the pipeline, there *has* to be reduced power usage, since Watt equals to Joule/second.

You should be using total FPS from Fraps, when talking about the work the GPU does. It doesn't matter if it is a runt or not, the GPU still rendered the whole frame. It just gets overwritten by the 2nd GPU's image. In terms of power usage, Fraps has the more accurate picture.

In terms of what we find useful, that is where Observable FPS comes into play.

Yes, you are correct! :) The unmetered vs metered pic on the first page of the article is misleading and led me to believe there could be more delays introduced than there really are.

As you said, and is shown by total fps from fraps, both setups are rendering the same amount of frames (so, doing the same work), the metered setup just has a different "starting point" (see my comment below).

Still, I guess most of the time the power consumption between both (metered vs unmetered) will be equal, as when rendering a constant framerate both GPUs will be at 100% usage with one starting rendering when the other has its frame ~50% complete.

Only when there are more complex scenes where the framerate starts dipping (more time to render each frame) there is a need to pause one of the GPUs untill the other is at ~50% frame completion. The reverse case is also an interesting conundrum. :)

From what I understand, saving the data from a 60hz run, requires a RAID 0 setup with SSD's, otherwise the storage can't keep up. I believe THG required 5 SSD's in RAID 0 just to be able to store the data fast enough so they can analyze it later.

I'm guessing there are technical roadblocks for 120hz to be analyzed like this. The FCAT card may also not be capable of taking in data that fast either.

I don't want to give you a big head or anything, but might you have helped AMD with a vital bit of debugging/testing that they never thought of? What does this do to 3x 7970s? I also want to know if they will backport the update to 6870/6970/6990s if this is possible. If you can do anything else like this to give them more data to help out AMD card users, we will be eternally grateful, though I'm not sure NVidia will be happy about it.

I've read another review about 7990's performance, FCAT, prototype driver, etc, basically the same thing, although there was something i noticed.
In their benchmarks the hardware (FRAPS) FPS was also quite bigger for the prototype d. compared to the basic catalyst 7990. While for the observable FPS this difference is easy understandable, i found no explanation for the extra FPS.
Prototype driver just "arranges" the frames in a smoother way, but why it appears to produce more frames?

I installed my 7990 last night and went straight to BF3...Frame Rates sucked! I was expecting much more from this card. I am reading where it is a driver issue and that the driver to fix these issues should have been released already. Is it out? How do I fix this issue so I get the card to work better than the GTX 570 I used to have??